Persona Poems

Earlier, all day today, I didn't know what to write.

I know you feel me because that's part of what brings us here together.

Out the window above my desk, the clouds resembled ideas of a cloud, and ultimately after a long afternoon spinning wheels, the idea of the clouds called me outside. I was tempted by the notion that I could get closer to the clouds, not as idea, but image.

^{Image: White clouds stripe a light blue sky in bubbly formations. The foreground shows a treeline of evergreens.}

So I took out the bag of trash and kept on walking, away from the cemetery and toward the thrift store, to try on other people's jackets that could be mine. 

Later, returning to the place I've recently assigned the word "home," the sky made colors I ultimately cannot name: orange, sure, but that's hardly sufficient.

^{Image: A fiery sunset burns low on the horizon, behind silhouettes of trees, both evergreen and deciduous.}

Back at my bookshelf, feeling less changed by my time under fluorescent lights than I'd hoped, I simply tried to notice what I noticed. And I ended up back at my desk with Vice: New and Selected Poems by the poet Ai (1947—2010), pronounced like "eye," or "I".

What stopped me first on "More" (p. 63) was the dedication of the poem to another poet, "for James Wright." That's what got me reading.

Perhaps I was also looking for a poem that would help me make sense of this week in the United States, and last week too, and next week, surely. So, the phrase "Pilgrim's pride" kept me reading.

The poem is from Ai's collection titled Sin, which was published in 1986 (seven years after Killing Floor and five years before Fate).

While I've read and taught Ai's poem "Cuba, 1962" in depth, I'd not read this poem "More" before.

Known for her persona poems, persona meaning "mask" in Latin, when Ai uses the first-person pronoun "I" in her poems, nothing can be assumed to be autobiographical. While this is almost always the case in poems, with poets insisting on discussion of a poem's "speaker" as distinct from the poet, I can report from avid use that Twitter is full of memes joshing the sometimes small distinction. The speakers of Ai's poems traverse time and space, often animating some specific moment in history in shocking ways that the intimacy of the first-person "I" creates. 

Her speakers are characters she's created, which to me gives further resonance to the homophones of "Ai," her pen name since 1969, which translates to "love" in Japanese: Ai, I, and eye. In her own words, "My poems come from the unconscious – I’m irrevocably tied to the lives of all people, both in and out of time" (Modern American Poetry).

There's no way around it, violence is present in many of Ai's poems. This is an observation but not a critique; Gwendolyn Brooks reminds us that "Poetry is life distilled."

Still, I admit I was looking for something... well, upbeat as I flipped the pages of Vice, perhaps a futile fantasy. But in this poem "More" I found the stubborn will to live that hums for me now much louder than it did before. This is something I've heard from others, all part of how the pandemic's changed us.

Ai has described her work this way: "no matter what the characters go through, no matter what their end, they mean to live."

In "More," we're taken immediately into a dream, where America the place is also a person, specifically a demoralized prom date lying on her back under dizzying decor. Her corsage wilts. She wonders out loud about the worth of this place, her namesake. The poem's persona responds, and I found myself genuinely surprised. In Marcus Jackson's reading of "More" he describes this moment as buying the poem time (New Ohio Review): "the speaker surprises by doubling down and contending that this land, this country, is worth as much or more than love itself. Hence, the poem buys some more time to take inventory of the surreal American experience."

In other poems of Ai's, she wields stanza breaks almost alchemically, presenting us with a blank line just as some shocking moment of transformation or revelation occurs for a character in the poem. In fact it was her poem "Cuba, 1962," that first got me thinking about stanza breaks as not necessarily empty space, not always a vacant wedge driven between two otherwise proximate lines of a poem, but rather, a way to hold space in a poem with something other than language. Form expressing content that cannot, or will not, be transcribed.

So it struck me, the fact that "More" unfolds as all one stanza. Here, though, I felt a similar sort of transformation rendered through sound rather than stanza break. Anyone familiar with the way Robert Hayden uses soft and hard sounds in "Those Winter Sundays" to unfurl the emotional landscape—the house warming, the edges rounding in the son's memory of his father—will recognize what happens here:

She sighed,
the band played,
the skin fell away from her bones.
Then the room went black
and I woke.
I want my life back,
the days of too much clarity,
the nights smelling of rage,
but it's gone.

Three lines full of "s" pivots hard to "k" just as the dream image of America the prom date dissolves, and the narrator's awakening yields surprising disclosure. The poem bends itself around sound to wake up from the dream.

The sound also thwarts us from coming too close to the gooey vulnerable core of the poem's narrator, even though we get satisfyingly near what they are feeling. I'm so moved by the subtle symphony of this moment.

One total fact I cannot ignore, my body is aging. It's only some solace that I'm not alone in this. I see it when I look in the mirror at the thrift store to evaluate a jacket, even in the spaces around my mask.

While I've heard the pandemic called an "accelerator" as far as life decisions go, including for sure my founding of Spellworks, it also seems to be accelerating time and gravity's effects on my form. 

And so while at first it seemed to me a fool's errand to go flipping through pages of Ai's poems for anything remotely upbeat, I did find what I was looking for. I felt it when the speaker responds with "Love," and I felt it again when a hospital bed seems to become a raft careening down the Ohio River. "I'd hold on, I'd hold, / till the weight, / till the awful heaviness / tore from me ..."

Those lines also include that magical combo of repetition + variation, in "I'd hold on, I'd hold." That magical combo is one of my favorites and one about which I'll write a lot for Spellworks. 

What I want to convey is this: If you feel any bit dead from the ringer that is America, from life, time, and what it sends us through, keep going. Whatever your raft is, find it. Grip it. And if you can't grip it, just get on and float. Sometimes for me it's the color red. Sometimes rivers. Always poetry. And yes, oh yes, love.

Here's Ai's poem in full.

More

for James Wright

Last night, I dreamed of America.
It was prom night.
She lay down under the spinning globes
at the makeshift bandstand
in her worn-out dress
and too-high heels
the gardenia
pinned at her waist
was brown and crumbling into itself.
What's it worth, she cried,
this land of Pilgrims' pride?
As much as love, I answered. More.
The globes spun.
I never won anything, I said,
I lost time and lovers, years,
but you, purple mountains,
you amber waves of grain, belong to me
as much as I do to you.
She sighed,
the band played,
the skin fell away from her bones.
Then the room went black
and I woke.
I want my life back,
the days of too much clarity,
the nights smelling of rage,
but it's gone.
If I could shift my body
that is too weak now,
I'd lie face down on this hospital bed,
this icy water called Ohio River.
I'd float past all the sad towns,
past all the dreamers onshore
with their hands out.
I'd hold on, I'd hold,
till the weight,
till the awful heaviness
tore from me,
sank to the bottom and stayed.
Then I'd stand up
like Lazarus
and walk home across the water.

Scans of my annotated pages depict what I noticed as I read this poem. I've underlined words that connect to one another through sound, like "cried" and "pride," and "black," "woke," and "back." I've also jotted margin notes of other texts I'm reminded of, including Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays." You can right-click on any of these thumbnails and select "Open image in new tab" to view larger size.

Read with

"American Wedding" by Essex Hemphill
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
"They Call the Mountain Carlos" by Ray Gonzalez
"Song" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
"The Secret of Light" by James Wright

Try this

Ai read widely and often honed in on historical figures that drew her attention from newspapers, history books, and literature. In a 1999 interview, she said, "I tend to like scoundrels. I like to write about scoundrels because they are more rounded characters in some respects than a really good person. You know, there's a lot more to talk about with the scoundrels." (PBS)

Make a list of so-called "scoundrels" whose facts of life resonate for you in some way however small, whether you have in common: a bloodline, hometown, political leaning, first name, occupation, or other. Begin with the words "I am" (a practice I learned from my teacher Lynda Barry) and keep writing beyond the news story, beyond the historical record, into the core of what this person wants, into why they want to live.

Once you're done writing, make sure you come all the way back from that "spinning globe." Have an apple, make a cup of tea, cuddle your animal, take a shower, crack a window, or change your socks... you know best what will ground you back into your time, place, body, life. Perhaps with renewed permission to be fully rounded.